The royal charter on press regulation agreed by parliament is a dead duck, according to industry sources I have consulted today.

They believe that the Privy Council cannot possibly ask the Queen to grant the charter because of the rules that it is obliged to follow.According to the council's guidance: "Any proposal which is rendered controversial by a counter-petition is unlikely to succeed."

So, given that the overwhelming majority of the press industry has put forward an alternative charter, there is little to no chance of the council assenting to the original charter. The press has effectively defeated the will of parliament.

This will be particularly galling for the council's lord president, Nick Clegg, who has been an advocate of the charter opposed by most of the newspaper publishers. By tradition, he has the position courtesy of being the deputy prime minister.

The Privy Council is due to meet next on 15 May and it had been expected that the charter, which was voted through by both houses and is, in effect, sponsored by parliament, would be rubber-stamped by the council's members.

What is also uncertain at this stage is the fate of the alternative charter, which appears to have the support of almost every newspaper and magazine publisher across Britain. Among the exceptions are The Guardian, the Financial Times and Private Eye.

Is it possible for that to be agreed by the Privy Council? A source within government tells me that the new charter is in draft form and it would therefore appear unlikely to be approved by the Privy Council at the 15 May meeting.

It is also the case, quite obviously, that the existence of the parliament-sponsored charter amounts a counter-petition.

What is surely apparent is that the industry has been successful in ambushing parliament's charter.

Conceived in secrecy - there were no leaks ahead of its announcement on Thursday - it took the campaigning group Hacked Off and politicians completely by surprise.

According to one rumour, the alternative charter proposal was the brainchild of a peer who has had previous links to the newspaper industry. And editors at The Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail seized on it as a shrewd way to prevent parliament's charter from being given the royal assent.